We've been lucky to enjoy the pleasant late summer warmth, but as nature now transitions toward a more normal autumn season, it's time to update Assetti's news!
This newsletter covers topics including the benefits of more efficient data management, product news for Investors and Asset managers, update on Corporate Real Estate Management, a study we conducted (locally) this summer on sustainability reporting, as well as further development of the AI application we published for the German market.
Let's start with data management.
As we mentioned in the first newsletter of the year, the overarching theme for 2025 will be better and more efficient data management, the benefits of which are obvious. This enables better daily decisions and data driven management of your Real Estate portfolios. Time and effort are saved when you don't always have to search for everything "from somewhere out there." In previous editions, we presented features including customizable property cards and key information as well as labels and customizable filters.
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The topic of this newsletter is collapsible/expandable tabs. From Assetti's customization menu, you can simply open or close tabs as needed. "Information about Capex repairs is not needed at this stage". OK, let's click it out of view in the user interface. "Do we still need plot information visible?" If not, hide that too by clicking. The same logic applies to all other tabs as well.
The complete customisability of the user interface enables users to see and handle only the information which is relevant to the business. No unnecessary or empty data fields, or data fields used for something other than what they were originally designed for. This significantly reduces daily noise, saves time, and makes work more productive.
We have been in the business now for over ten years – exactly 12 years this October (company was founded in October 2013). If we have learned anything during these years, it is that financial accounting data is relatively straightforward to process and manage thanks to chart of accounts, but Rentrolls derived from lease administration are often... well... challenging, because despite the similarity of the data content, they often vary from case to case. In addition, contract and unit changes are usually poorly documented, if at all. This leads to unnecessary work and practical headaches – as well as outright errors. We wrote about this in our summer blog.
Another level of complication arises when attempting to forecast the Rentroll. Yet, forecasting is essential data for both short-term operational planning and cash flow management, not to mention valuations and following up business plans made during the acquisition phase of a property. Despite this complexity – or precisely because of it – we began developing a feature which is called Rentroll forecaster.
It can be used to create contract- and property-specific forecasts for a desired period based on the current Rentroll. It is also easy to create different alternative future scenarios. This is significantly faster than doing everything manually in Excel. We will release the functionality at the end of the year. If you would like to become a beta user, please contact us to discuss how we can dramatically improve the efficiency of forecasting - either on the individual Asset or aggregated Portfolio level. We will continue with investment modeling later, allowing you to manage processes from invoicing to cash flow modeling, forecasting, and reporting with a single system.
We signed Stihl as a client in 2024. This sparked interest in the industry, and discussions have since progressed promisingly with several interested companies. For these discussions, we have also created a global demo portfolio that illustrates the importance of data visualization. This information is often managed in corporations and smaller companies using (again) master data Excel. In addition, management of operations using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is still in its infancy due to the lack of a proper data tool.
Since real estate has not previously been considered an asset, particularly in the manufacturing industry, it offers a great deal of potential that requires only a global asset inventory and systematic review of it. Savings can be identified and potential hidden value can be realized. Assetti is an excellent and cost-effective solution for managing global Corporate Real Estate portfolios.We wrote about this topic earlier this spring in our blog.
The real estate industry has great potential for utilizing AI; this is easy to agree on. Another matter is finding those use cases where applying AI solves a concrete problem or task. We believe the most concrete use cases are currently in data extraction in a structured manner.
We have experimented with and tested AI in various use cases, one of which we published this summer.
We built a use case where we extract and import into Assetti chart of accounts-compliant data from financial source material from a standard report of an accounting software (DATEV) used by the client. This way, we keep actual data up-to-date as a continuous service. We implemented this for a German client and have since expanded the service to another, Swiss property management system.
We are expanding use cases during the autumn, and if utilizing AI in portfolio management is relevant in any way, get in touch and let's see what we can do together.
Simple answer: In Excel.
We conducted a study this summer on Finnish real estate investors' sustainability reporting data management. Two key findings: 1) ESG is not some passing trend or additional burden, but to an increasing extent a business critical "must have" 2) Point solutions are in use, especially for energy consumption monitoring, but unifying data consolidation is missing, making the common approach to store data in massive Excel spreadsheets. This is hardly an optimal solution in the long run. We also wrote about this in our blog.
Instead of Excel, Assetti offers a solution for convenient centralized data management for ESG reporting. This starts from such simple things as storing data on EPC (Energy Performance Certificates) or, for example, tenants' electricity and heating consumption for Scope 3 calculation & reporting purposes. From this basis, you can further develop automating various reporting standards or calculation models. In short, if you want to simplify the data collection and management required for sustainability reporting, contact us.
We will be present again at Exporeal at the beginning of October. If you want to catch up or discuss how Assetti can streamline and facilitate portfolio management, get in touch and book a meeting with our CEO here.
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